Trainspotters: Source Code, Queen to Play, Le Quattro Volte

If you ever wondered what Groundhog Day might look like as a thriller, you’ll find your answer in Source Code. It’s the fast, tricky story of Colter Stevens (Jake Gyllenhaal), an American soldier in Afghanistan who somehow keeps waking up over and over again on the same Chicago commuter train sitting across from the same likable woman, Christina Warren, played by the reassuring Michelle Monaghan. If that’s not freaky enough, each time Stevens only has eight minutes to stop the train from blowing sky-high. And if that’s still not freaky enough, there’s a scientist, Colleen Goodwin, played by the unsettling Vera Farmiga, who keeps sending him back in every time he and his fellow passengers go ka-boom.

Relentlessly paced and admirably brief—you’re in and out in 90 minutes—Source Code builds to an ending that is goofy and a bit baffling. Yet it’s hard to complain about any movie that offers **Ben Ripley’**s neatly calibrated script and such taut direction by Duncan Jones, who is (as I’m sure he’s tired of hearing) the son of David Bowie. Although this is only his second feature, Jones already has a clean, confident style and a sure hand with actors—this is Gyllenhaal’s best performance since Brokeback Mountain. And as he showed in his prize-winning debut, Moon, Jones has more on his mind than just action. He’s clearly fascinated by the existential crises of characters caught in the nowhereland between life and death, illusion and reality. I don’t know whether this reveals something important about being the son of a rock star—think of all those hours spent in hotel rooms, or being asked the same questions about one’s father—but both of Jones’s movies are about men condemned to repeat actions over and over while caught in insanely claustrophobic conditions.

Briefly: In **Caroline Bottaro’**s Queen to Play,Sandrine Bonnaire stars as Hélène, a Corsican house-cleaner who discovers a new sense of self—yep, it’s another story of empowerment—when she develops a passion for chess. She’s taught the game by one of her clients, Dr. Kröger, a gruff American played by Kevin Kline who, alas, is less memorable for venturing the role in French than for his menagerie of grumpy mannerisms and world-wise smiles. Although much of the action feels too familiar—it unfolds like the chess version of Shall We Dance?—the movie is carried by yet another brilliant performance by Bonnaire who, in the 28 years since her revelatory debut as a sexually free teen in À Nos Amours, has been as consistently superb as any actress working anywhere. Whether Hélène is fighting with Kröger, trying to rekindle her husband’s ardor, or revealing newfound assurance as she ponders a chess move, Bonnaire is always natural, compelling, and formidably alive.

Still, the most astonishing star turn I’ve seen this year comes in Le Quattro Volte, a movie as deliberate as Source Code is speedy. Set in and around a small Calabrian village south of Naples, **Michelangelo Frammartino’**s lovely, almost wordless exploration of passing time, the power of landscape, and the relationship between man and nature. While the film is a bit too neatly structured, too devoted to the rhythms of a pre-modern world, it contains genuine marvels. None are more marvelous than the long unedited sequence featuring a goat herder’s dog that, without benefit of CGI, becomes a tour de force of canine acting. If Daniel Day-Lewis came back as a dog, he couldn’t do it any better.